The Hydro Graphics Card: A Review of its Performance and Value

The Corsair Hydro graphics card is one of the latest additions to the market, with a price tag of $750 for the standard model. As we've seen before, the performance of this card is largely dependent on the power management and v bios limitations imposed by NVIDIA's architecture. In this review, we'll delve into the details of how this card performs compared to its competitors.

The card's performance is about the same as every other GTX 1080, with only a few percent difference in FPS when compared to other configurations. This is due to the fact that the silicon used in these cards is identical, and any differences are largely due to minor variations in manufacturing. However, it's worth noting that this card does come out on top in terms of single graphics card configurations and power management.

One of the main selling points of this card is its liquid cooling system, which provides superior thermal performance compared to other cards on the market. This is a significant advantage for gamers who want to push their systems to extreme overclocking levels without worrying about overheating. However, it's worth noting that this card does come with some power limitations, which may be a concern for those looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their system.

Despite these limitations, the Hydro graphics card still manages to outperform its competitors in most games, with stock settings and a peak overclock of 175 MHz. This is consistent with our previous tests of other GTX 1080 cards, including the Founder's Edition model. However, it's worth noting that this card does not quite reach the same level of performance as the DIY Hybrid solution we built earlier.

The Hydro graphics card also has some unique features that set it apart from its competitors. For example, it comes with an overclocking support feature that allows users to push their systems to higher performance levels without worrying about overheating. This is a significant advantage for those looking to squeeze every last bit of performance out of their system.

One thing that does set this card apart from other GTX 1080 cards on the market is its price point. At $750, it's significantly more expensive than some of our other reviews. However, as we've seen before, this card provides superior thermal performance and power management capabilities compared to its competitors.

In terms of overclocking, the Hydro graphics card does not quite reach the same level of performance as the Founder's Edition model or some other custom PCBs. However, it's worth noting that this card is still a significant performer at stock settings, and the difference in performance between this card and our previous tests is largely due to minor variations in manufacturing.

Thermals are another area where this card shines. With its liquid cooling system, the Hydro graphics card provides superior thermal performance compared to other cards on the market. This is particularly notable when pushing the system to extreme overclocking levels without worrying about overheating.

In conclusion, the Corsair Hydro graphics card is a significant performer in the world of high-end gaming. While it may not quite reach the same level of performance as some of our other reviews, its superior thermal performance and power management capabilities make it a compelling choice for gamers who want to push their systems to extreme levels without worrying about overheating.

As always, we'll be providing more detailed analysis and information in our upcoming article. Stay tuned for more content and don't forget to subscribe for the latest updates.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe corsair hydro graphics gtx 1080 is the child of a partnership between msi and corsair costs 750 dollars and it's a bit different from the gtx 1080 hybrid that we'll be talking about shortly for this card corsair provides the cooler an h55 cooler with some slight modifications and msi provides the board and access to nvidia for the gpu itself and as far as these two cars we'll be comparing them directly in a very soon to come video before we get into the content and the review of this content is brought to you by ibuypower and their element gaming pc which comes with the arc led fans under glow for neon effect on the system and a large tempered glass side window let's get into the content first off we tore down the hydro graphics in another video that's already on the channel the tear down process involves a handful of screws for the back plate but reveals ultimately that this is an msi low end card that's been outfitted with a cpu cooler for liquid cooling and the corsair cooler does not use a protrusion for the cold plate like evgas does but does appear to be flat rather than curved like most cpu cooler cold plates are they've normally got that slight concave bend to them that accommodates the ihs and the hot spots on a cpu which you don't want for gpus because the silicon is flat and no curvature is required the board is a founder's edition board with a five plus one phase vrm but a back plate has been added in addition to the liquid cooler corsair uses a radial blower fan for the cooler solution well of course an msi since it is basically a founder's edition cooler other than the liquid and that's something we'll talk about more in our upcoming evga hybrid versus seahawk hydro graphics coverage for specs it's the same thing as any other gtx 1080 eight gigabytes of gddr5x gp104-400 gpu and all of that which comes with the gp 104 400 gpu but the clock is pre-overclocked to 1847 megahertz about the same as the msi gtx 1080 gaming x and that's a reasonable gain over the founders edition 1733 megahertz boost note that msi pre-applies the overclock mode to this reviewer card but it will ship to consumers in gaming mode and that can be changed with bios updates or with the software that comes with the card so for today we're benchmarking the thermals most extensively obviously it's mostly a thermal solution here and we'll be comparing that against our 1080 hybrid that we built different from this one but using the same cpu gpu clc so you can check that content out previously we'll be comparing those two directly for now this card came in today as we're about to start filming this video so we haven't tested it just yet i mean the plastic's still on there but today we're looking at this card almost exclusively we'll be doing thermals games and overclocking starting with thermals our tests consist of peak average thermals using delta t over ambient and of endurance thermals that represent the gpu diode temperature only this helps us define thermal throttle points and clock rate instability as correlated in hour versus time charts let's start with the peak average thermals the gtx 1080 hydro graphics lands first among the high-end pascal gpus in a good way at 18.5 celsius delta t over ambient load and this plant's corsair and msi the amalgam ahead of our diy hybrid that we built a few weeks ago this used the evga cooler and a less official implementation of that evga cooler our version of the gtx 1080 hybrid the gn hybrid operates at 18.66 celsius so it's 0.16 c warmer and has a lower clock rate than the corsair card which of course also impacts heat we believe that part of the difference comes from the implementation we use longer screws that weren't really meant for it and that has imperfect mounting pressure applied as a result and we also rendered the blower fan mostly useless by sacking the shroud and so neighboring components get warmer but we'll see how that does in a soon to come test for reference the founders edition gtx 1080 operates at around 57.51 celsius delta t over ambience a swing of about 39 c and that's with a higher clock on the hydro graphics card here's the temperature over time plot this shows the same data but plotted over time and demonstrates our automated test execution kicking off the load test at the same point for all cards this is mostly used for internal data integrity and validation but helps provide a look at ramp up time for each of the cards looking at our unique endurance charts this chart shows frequency versus temperature and time plotted over a two hour burn-in period the clock rate is fairly tame for the first 90 minutes with the average frequency range at about plus or minus 80 megahertz depending on boost and other factors later we start seeing hard drops of 215 megahertz and that's with an advanced cooling solution on the hydro graphics so it's clearly not a thermal issue we've seen this behavior on a couple of pascal gpus thus far and it always starts to happen around the same 90 to 100 minute mark and at this point the clock rate will occasionally for a one second period dropped to 215 megahertz from the near two gigahertz mark previously one second prior we've reached out to nvidia to ask about this anomaly in more depth as it is occurring somewhat regularly on pascal and in this instance it's not a thermal throttle obviously and likely power or boost functionality and video has informed us thus far that this is partly normal boost functionality but we're waiting for further feedback to understand better why this happens on some cards and not others on the whole though nvidia basically says not all their cards are created equal especially with gpu boost 3.0 and that we would need a much larger sample size to get a proper idea of what's going on but that's what the chart shows for now anyway for power consumption and noise tests check the article linked in the description below where we've got the full depth on everything for now let's go into fps charts all our methodology again is defined in that article linked in the description below if you're curious about how we test gpus some helpful videos are also embedded which include one percent and 0.1 percent low definitions starting with mirror's edge catalyst we see the corsair hydro graphics topping the single card charts at 51 fps average for 4k high with a 42 fps and 38 fps 1 and 0.1 percent load respectively as usual we see the biggest improvement over sli in the form of low values the msi gtx 1080 gaming x clocked the same performs nearly identically to the hydro graphics which is again a board made by msi for the seahawk in some games we may see some difference in fps thanks to improved thermal solution that helps sustain a flatter clock rate for longer even though the clock is to the same spec this is something we discuss in our titan x hybrid results at 1440p we're seeing 95 fps on the hydro graphics with slightly favored lows over the gaming x card founder's edition 1080 is running at 89 fps with a 1070 cards in the 72 fps range at 1080p as expected this is no trouble for any of these devices at least not until the 960 and 460 which run below 60fps average the hydrographic sits at 139 average with lows minimally at 77 fps and with the 1080 gaming x at 137 fps average or nearly 74 fps 0.1 lows the founder's edition card is at 135 fps average that's a difference of four fps from the hydro graphics or a change of about 2.6 percent moving on to gta 5 we see the hydro graphics performing at 59 fps average with 4k ultra settings with lows of 46 fps and 43.7 fps that plants the corsair and msi card just above the msi 1080 gaming x at 58.3 fps average and with imperceptibly slower low fps the fe card sits at 56 fps average or a change of about five percent to the hydro graphics one step down the 1070 gaming x it's at 47 fps average with significantly lower 0.1 percent low values moving to 1080p at gta 5 the hydro graphics is capable of pushing about 135 fps average with tightly timed lows 1080 gaming x sits at 129.7 fps or a change of about four percent and the gtx 1080 fe clocks at 125 fps average so we're starting to bump up against the cpu limit in some instances with this test black ops 3 is a vendor-neutral title that tends to show some favor toward amd just the way it was optimized at 4k high we're seeing the gtx 1080 hydro graphics perform at about 73 fps average with lows that are mostly in step with the msi 1080 gaming x they're marginally reduced as a result of boost clock functionality during this particular title but the hydro graphics does maintain about a 1 fps lead that's really all we can expect from two cars on the same silicon at this point in this particular title crossfire and sli configurations will outperform the single 1080 hydro graphics although with disproportionately lower one percent and 0.1 low metrics at 1440p we see the hydro graphics pushing 143 fps just at the 144 hertz point for fps players who care about that and with high sustained low metrics 1080 gaming x is about one to two percent slower with a gtx 1080 fe a full 8 fps or 5.7 percent slower 1080p is a little unnecessary to test again but we're doing it anyway because so much of the market is still on 1080p with high settings we've still got room to go up to extra as well but we're pushing 212 fps out the gate average with high settings and the 1080 gaming x is just behind the fe is showing roughly a 5 change as with previous tests moving on to ashes this will be our last fps benchmark before overclocking results check the article linked in the description below for additional benchmark games including metro mordor and the division first looking at average millisecond latency between the frames the corsair hydro graphics is chart topping and ashes of the singularity for its average latency in dx12 posting 12.99 milliseconds between frames the msi gaming x sits at 13.19 milliseconds with the fe card at 13.38 crossfire rx 480s are the next trailing configuration at 13.88 milliseconds average in dx12 but with way worse dx11 frame time is partially an artifact of multi-gpu looking instead of fps the 1080 hydro graphics at 1080p is posting 76.95 fps average for dx12 25 fps gain over dx11 performance the same scaling is shown for the 1080 fe though that card is about 2 fps slower on average than the hydro graphics moving to 4k high in ashes shows the hydro graphics just above 60fps average at 62.03 the 1080 gaming x is a couple fps slower at 59.6 fps average with the crossfire cards budding between the fe and the gaming x again for more game benchmarks check the article linked in the description below and now that we've gone through the basics of these we're going to go through some of the overclocking so for that if you want to see that methodology again down below it's a lot of words so we're not going to go through it in every single video overclocking methodology is basically the same as it's always been for us we're using manual tuning rather than scan oc it just doesn't work well for what we're trying to do here's a look at our overclock stepping chart for the gtx 1080 hydro graphics we ultimately landed at 21 26 megahertz peak core clock that's the max with an average baseline of about 20 50 megahertz reliably the core offset was stable at plus 175 megahertz with a fairly sizable memory overclock as shown here power target only gets offset by five percent on this particular card so 105 percent is your max and gpu v core seems to peak at 1.05 volts here's a look at the fps impact we're seeing a couple fps maximally in some titles shadow of mordor and mirror's edge being two of them but that's about it the card is mostly at its limit out of the box despite an increased range with the overclock that's similar to the performance we've seen with every other 1080 thus far part of this limit it comes down to power again 105 percent offset there's not a lot of room for extra power draw that's permissible anyway through the software and without volt mods and hard mods and then part of it is v bios can't really increase voltage with these cards it just doesn't work and the max we're getting is 1.05 volts so not a huge push on that with the overclocking support at 750 dollars corsair and msi are certainly asking a lot for the hydro graphics or the seahawk if you prefer it's not unreasonable given the price of the founders edition card which kind of shakes up the market a bit in some ways that we don't necessarily agree with but prices should fall eventually this though is certainly a value add it's an extra 50 or so over the founders edition card so it's asking more money but you're getting the liquid cooler with it as i understand it this thing should fall out about 7 30 so we'll be looking at this shortly but strictly speaking to this card performance is about the same as every other gtx 1080 as one would expect this is not news to any gpu or architecture they pretty much perform within a few percent of each other until you really get into extreme overclocks and that's just because the silicon is exactly the same naturally so fps out of the box is more or less the same this is technically the chart topper it is the best performer on the charts right now for single graphics card configurations and power management and v bios limitations for this generation do seem to somewhat invalidate some of the higher end fancier boards like the custom pcbs and higher-end vrms things like that so corsair and msi are getting away just fine with the sort of bare bones vrm and pcb for this setup because they're not targeting hard mods vault mods extreme overclockers folks like that so if you're not one of those people the configuration here is pretty much fine there is some certainly some power limitation but it's hard to be too mad about a 20 50 megahertz offs or overclock total 175 megahertz offset it's not as good as our founders edition card that we overclocked and especially not as good as it after we applied liquid to it we were able to hit 21 something 2168 i believe megahertz with a peak of 2202 though that was unstable at that point so not quite there but that seems consistent with a lot of these 1080s that are not the the sample that we got initially it must have been a good sample overall thermally this is far and away superior to all the other cars we've looked at right now it's very close to the diy hybrid we built which leads me to believe it should be very close to this competition will be really tight between the two cards depending on even evga's implementation outside of what we did their solution may be better than what we saw previously but it is a higher overclock as well it's actually a little bit higher than this card pre-overclocked though if you're changing the settings anyway it doesn't really matter what it comes stock because that's easily made up for it the hydro graphics is undeniably the highest performer of the single gpus currently on the bench including the msi gtx 1080 gaming x that we previously tested it's outperforming the founder's edition card by about five to six percent in most games stock further validating our statement that the reference designs from both amd and nvidia are generally best for gone by consumers in this market the next thing for you to do is to wait for this review should be coming out very shortly now that we finally have one it'll be an interesting battle for sure 750 dollars i i don't think is unfair but i think it's a bit too much on average and and i felt the same way about the 700 card so i would wait a little while hopefully these fall on price of it something in the 700 to 730 range does feel better 750 is pushing it a bit much for me personally of course your mileage may vary depending on how much money you have so that's kind of the basics of it if you want more depth as always the article will cover it the thermals are of course the most interesting check back for more on that with this one the differences between these two will be discussed in that content so thank you for watching as always patrolling the postal video links in the description below for more information subscribe for more content i'll see you all next time ah smells like the beachthe corsair hydro graphics gtx 1080 is the child of a partnership between msi and corsair costs 750 dollars and it's a bit different from the gtx 1080 hybrid that we'll be talking about shortly for this card corsair provides the cooler an h55 cooler with some slight modifications and msi provides the board and access to nvidia for the gpu itself and as far as these two cars we'll be comparing them directly in a very soon to come video before we get into the content and the review of this content is brought to you by ibuypower and their element gaming pc which comes with the arc led fans under glow for neon effect on the system and a large tempered glass side window let's get into the content first off we tore down the hydro graphics in another video that's already on the channel the tear down process involves a handful of screws for the back plate but reveals ultimately that this is an msi low end card that's been outfitted with a cpu cooler for liquid cooling and the corsair cooler does not use a protrusion for the cold plate like evgas does but does appear to be flat rather than curved like most cpu cooler cold plates are they've normally got that slight concave bend to them that accommodates the ihs and the hot spots on a cpu which you don't want for gpus because the silicon is flat and no curvature is required the board is a founder's edition board with a five plus one phase vrm but a back plate has been added in addition to the liquid cooler corsair uses a radial blower fan for the cooler solution well of course an msi since it is basically a founder's edition cooler other than the liquid and that's something we'll talk about more in our upcoming evga hybrid versus seahawk hydro graphics coverage for specs it's the same thing as any other gtx 1080 eight gigabytes of gddr5x gp104-400 gpu and all of that which comes with the gp 104 400 gpu but the clock is pre-overclocked to 1847 megahertz about the same as the msi gtx 1080 gaming x and that's a reasonable gain over the founders edition 1733 megahertz boost note that msi pre-applies the overclock mode to this reviewer card but it will ship to consumers in gaming mode and that can be changed with bios updates or with the software that comes with the card so for today we're benchmarking the thermals most extensively obviously it's mostly a thermal solution here and we'll be comparing that against our 1080 hybrid that we built different from this one but using the same cpu gpu clc so you can check that content out previously we'll be comparing those two directly for now this card came in today as we're about to start filming this video so we haven't tested it just yet i mean the plastic's still on there but today we're looking at this card almost exclusively we'll be doing thermals games and overclocking starting with thermals our tests consist of peak average thermals using delta t over ambient and of endurance thermals that represent the gpu diode temperature only this helps us define thermal throttle points and clock rate instability as correlated in hour versus time charts let's start with the peak average thermals the gtx 1080 hydro graphics lands first among the high-end pascal gpus in a good way at 18.5 celsius delta t over ambient load and this plant's corsair and msi the amalgam ahead of our diy hybrid that we built a few weeks ago this used the evga cooler and a less official implementation of that evga cooler our version of the gtx 1080 hybrid the gn hybrid operates at 18.66 celsius so it's 0.16 c warmer and has a lower clock rate than the corsair card which of course also impacts heat we believe that part of the difference comes from the implementation we use longer screws that weren't really meant for it and that has imperfect mounting pressure applied as a result and we also rendered the blower fan mostly useless by sacking the shroud and so neighboring components get warmer but we'll see how that does in a soon to come test for reference the founders edition gtx 1080 operates at around 57.51 celsius delta t over ambience a swing of about 39 c and that's with a higher clock on the hydro graphics card here's the temperature over time plot this shows the same data but plotted over time and demonstrates our automated test execution kicking off the load test at the same point for all cards this is mostly used for internal data integrity and validation but helps provide a look at ramp up time for each of the cards looking at our unique endurance charts this chart shows frequency versus temperature and time plotted over a two hour burn-in period the clock rate is fairly tame for the first 90 minutes with the average frequency range at about plus or minus 80 megahertz depending on boost and other factors later we start seeing hard drops of 215 megahertz and that's with an advanced cooling solution on the hydro graphics so it's clearly not a thermal issue we've seen this behavior on a couple of pascal gpus thus far and it always starts to happen around the same 90 to 100 minute mark and at this point the clock rate will occasionally for a one second period dropped to 215 megahertz from the near two gigahertz mark previously one second prior we've reached out to nvidia to ask about this anomaly in more depth as it is occurring somewhat regularly on pascal and in this instance it's not a thermal throttle obviously and likely power or boost functionality and video has informed us thus far that this is partly normal boost functionality but we're waiting for further feedback to understand better why this happens on some cards and not others on the whole though nvidia basically says not all their cards are created equal especially with gpu boost 3.0 and that we would need a much larger sample size to get a proper idea of what's going on but that's what the chart shows for now anyway for power consumption and noise tests check the article linked in the description below where we've got the full depth on everything for now let's go into fps charts all our methodology again is defined in that article linked in the description below if you're curious about how we test gpus some helpful videos are also embedded which include one percent and 0.1 percent low definitions starting with mirror's edge catalyst we see the corsair hydro graphics topping the single card charts at 51 fps average for 4k high with a 42 fps and 38 fps 1 and 0.1 percent load respectively as usual we see the biggest improvement over sli in the form of low values the msi gtx 1080 gaming x clocked the same performs nearly identically to the hydro graphics which is again a board made by msi for the seahawk in some games we may see some difference in fps thanks to improved thermal solution that helps sustain a flatter clock rate for longer even though the clock is to the same spec this is something we discuss in our titan x hybrid results at 1440p we're seeing 95 fps on the hydro graphics with slightly favored lows over the gaming x card founder's edition 1080 is running at 89 fps with a 1070 cards in the 72 fps range at 1080p as expected this is no trouble for any of these devices at least not until the 960 and 460 which run below 60fps average the hydrographic sits at 139 average with lows minimally at 77 fps and with the 1080 gaming x at 137 fps average or nearly 74 fps 0.1 lows the founder's edition card is at 135 fps average that's a difference of four fps from the hydro graphics or a change of about 2.6 percent moving on to gta 5 we see the hydro graphics performing at 59 fps average with 4k ultra settings with lows of 46 fps and 43.7 fps that plants the corsair and msi card just above the msi 1080 gaming x at 58.3 fps average and with imperceptibly slower low fps the fe card sits at 56 fps average or a change of about five percent to the hydro graphics one step down the 1070 gaming x it's at 47 fps average with significantly lower 0.1 percent low values moving to 1080p at gta 5 the hydro graphics is capable of pushing about 135 fps average with tightly timed lows 1080 gaming x sits at 129.7 fps or a change of about four percent and the gtx 1080 fe clocks at 125 fps average so we're starting to bump up against the cpu limit in some instances with this test black ops 3 is a vendor-neutral title that tends to show some favor toward amd just the way it was optimized at 4k high we're seeing the gtx 1080 hydro graphics perform at about 73 fps average with lows that are mostly in step with the msi 1080 gaming x they're marginally reduced as a result of boost clock functionality during this particular title but the hydro graphics does maintain about a 1 fps lead that's really all we can expect from two cars on the same silicon at this point in this particular title crossfire and sli configurations will outperform the single 1080 hydro graphics although with disproportionately lower one percent and 0.1 low metrics at 1440p we see the hydro graphics pushing 143 fps just at the 144 hertz point for fps players who care about that and with high sustained low metrics 1080 gaming x is about one to two percent slower with a gtx 1080 fe a full 8 fps or 5.7 percent slower 1080p is a little unnecessary to test again but we're doing it anyway because so much of the market is still on 1080p with high settings we've still got room to go up to extra as well but we're pushing 212 fps out the gate average with high settings and the 1080 gaming x is just behind the fe is showing roughly a 5 change as with previous tests moving on to ashes this will be our last fps benchmark before overclocking results check the article linked in the description below for additional benchmark games including metro mordor and the division first looking at average millisecond latency between the frames the corsair hydro graphics is chart topping and ashes of the singularity for its average latency in dx12 posting 12.99 milliseconds between frames the msi gaming x sits at 13.19 milliseconds with the fe card at 13.38 crossfire rx 480s are the next trailing configuration at 13.88 milliseconds average in dx12 but with way worse dx11 frame time is partially an artifact of multi-gpu looking instead of fps the 1080 hydro graphics at 1080p is posting 76.95 fps average for dx12 25 fps gain over dx11 performance the same scaling is shown for the 1080 fe though that card is about 2 fps slower on average than the hydro graphics moving to 4k high in ashes shows the hydro graphics just above 60fps average at 62.03 the 1080 gaming x is a couple fps slower at 59.6 fps average with the crossfire cards budding between the fe and the gaming x again for more game benchmarks check the article linked in the description below and now that we've gone through the basics of these we're going to go through some of the overclocking so for that if you want to see that methodology again down below it's a lot of words so we're not going to go through it in every single video overclocking methodology is basically the same as it's always been for us we're using manual tuning rather than scan oc it just doesn't work well for what we're trying to do here's a look at our overclock stepping chart for the gtx 1080 hydro graphics we ultimately landed at 21 26 megahertz peak core clock that's the max with an average baseline of about 20 50 megahertz reliably the core offset was stable at plus 175 megahertz with a fairly sizable memory overclock as shown here power target only gets offset by five percent on this particular card so 105 percent is your max and gpu v core seems to peak at 1.05 volts here's a look at the fps impact we're seeing a couple fps maximally in some titles shadow of mordor and mirror's edge being two of them but that's about it the card is mostly at its limit out of the box despite an increased range with the overclock that's similar to the performance we've seen with every other 1080 thus far part of this limit it comes down to power again 105 percent offset there's not a lot of room for extra power draw that's permissible anyway through the software and without volt mods and hard mods and then part of it is v bios can't really increase voltage with these cards it just doesn't work and the max we're getting is 1.05 volts so not a huge push on that with the overclocking support at 750 dollars corsair and msi are certainly asking a lot for the hydro graphics or the seahawk if you prefer it's not unreasonable given the price of the founders edition card which kind of shakes up the market a bit in some ways that we don't necessarily agree with but prices should fall eventually this though is certainly a value add it's an extra 50 or so over the founders edition card so it's asking more money but you're getting the liquid cooler with it as i understand it this thing should fall out about 7 30 so we'll be looking at this shortly but strictly speaking to this card performance is about the same as every other gtx 1080 as one would expect this is not news to any gpu or architecture they pretty much perform within a few percent of each other until you really get into extreme overclocks and that's just because the silicon is exactly the same naturally so fps out of the box is more or less the same this is technically the chart topper it is the best performer on the charts right now for single graphics card configurations and power management and v bios limitations for this generation do seem to somewhat invalidate some of the higher end fancier boards like the custom pcbs and higher-end vrms things like that so corsair and msi are getting away just fine with the sort of bare bones vrm and pcb for this setup because they're not targeting hard mods vault mods extreme overclockers folks like that so if you're not one of those people the configuration here is pretty much fine there is some certainly some power limitation but it's hard to be too mad about a 20 50 megahertz offs or overclock total 175 megahertz offset it's not as good as our founders edition card that we overclocked and especially not as good as it after we applied liquid to it we were able to hit 21 something 2168 i believe megahertz with a peak of 2202 though that was unstable at that point so not quite there but that seems consistent with a lot of these 1080s that are not the the sample that we got initially it must have been a good sample overall thermally this is far and away superior to all the other cars we've looked at right now it's very close to the diy hybrid we built which leads me to believe it should be very close to this competition will be really tight between the two cards depending on even evga's implementation outside of what we did their solution may be better than what we saw previously but it is a higher overclock as well it's actually a little bit higher than this card pre-overclocked though if you're changing the settings anyway it doesn't really matter what it comes stock because that's easily made up for it the hydro graphics is undeniably the highest performer of the single gpus currently on the bench including the msi gtx 1080 gaming x that we previously tested it's outperforming the founder's edition card by about five to six percent in most games stock further validating our statement that the reference designs from both amd and nvidia are generally best for gone by consumers in this market the next thing for you to do is to wait for this review should be coming out very shortly now that we finally have one it'll be an interesting battle for sure 750 dollars i i don't think is unfair but i think it's a bit too much on average and and i felt the same way about the 700 card so i would wait a little while hopefully these fall on price of it something in the 700 to 730 range does feel better 750 is pushing it a bit much for me personally of course your mileage may vary depending on how much money you have so that's kind of the basics of it if you want more depth as always the article will cover it the thermals are of course the most interesting check back for more on that with this one the differences between these two will be discussed in that content so thank you for watching as always patrolling the postal video links in the description below for more information subscribe for more content i'll see you all next time ah smells like the beach\n"